Were We There Already? Applying Minimal Generalization to the SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task on Cognitively Plausible Morphological Inflection

AbstractMorphological rules with various levels of specificity can be learned from example lexemes by recursive application of minimal generalization (Albright and Hayes, 2002, 2003). A model that learns rules solely through minimal generalization was used to predict average human wug-test ratings from German, English, and Dutch in the SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2021 Shared Task, with competitive results. Some formal properties of the minimal generalization operation were proved. An automatic method was developed to create wug-test stimuli for future experiments that investigate whether the model’s morphological generalizations are too minimal.